Poll: U.S. Is a Land of Prayer, Belief in Heaven, Angels, and the Supremacy of a Higher Power
Americans are a people of faith, with strongly held beliefs in heaven, angels, the power of prayer, and the supremacy of a higher guiding force, a poll released Saturday by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows.
Pollsters found some 69 percent of people across the nation think angels are real, while the same number also believe in heaven and 72 percent believe in the power of prayer.
The Almighty is still all-powerful, with 79 percent of Americans believing in God or a higher power alongside 63 percent thinking karma is real, the polling shows.
Eighty-six percent of adults who believe that there are things that science or nature cannot explain also believe in God or a higher power, while 14 percent do not.
Among those who do not believe there are things that science or nature cannot explain, 44 percent believe in God or a higher power.
The widespread acceptance of angels shown in the AP-NORC poll makes sense to Susan Garrett, an angel expert and New Testament professor at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Kentucky.
It tracks with historical surveys, she said, telling AP the U.S. remains a faith-filled country even as more Americans reject organized religion, as Breitbart News previously reported.
But if the devil is in the details, so are people’s understandings of angels.
“They’re very malleable,” Garrett said of angels. “You can have any one of a number of quite different worldviews in terms of your understanding of how the cosmos is arranged, whether there’s spirit beings, whether there’s life after death, whether there’s a God … and still find a place for angels in that worldview.”
Talk of angels, Garrett said, is often also about something else, like the ways God interacts with the world and other hard-to-articulate ideas.
File/The stone angel which inspired the title of Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical 1929 novel ‘Look Homeward Angel’ stands in Oakdale Cemetery in Hendersonville, North Carolina. (Robert Alexander/Getty)
The large number of U.S. adults who say they believe in angels includes 84 percent of those with a religious affiliation — 94 percent of evangelical Protestants, 81 percent of mainline Protestants and 82 percent of Catholics — and 33 percent of those without one.
And of those angel-believing religiously unaffiliated, that includes two percent of atheists, 25 percent of agnostics and 50 percent of those identified as “nothing in particular.”
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey polled 1,680 adults from May 11 to May 15, with a sampling error of 3.4 percent.
Follow Simon Kent on Twitter: or e-mail to: skent@breitbart.com
Faith Wins: Southern Illinois U. Edwardsville Ordered to Pay Christian Student $80K for Silencing Her Views
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) has been ordered to pay a Christian student $80,000 for silencing her conservative views as part of a lawsuit settlement. Additionally, three professors must undergo First Amendment training as a result of the lawsuit brought by Alliance Defending Freedom.
In her lawsuit, the student claimed that SIUE had censored her speech and discriminated against her after other students complained about her conservative and pro-life social media posts, according to a report by Fox News.
Man hands palm up praying and worship of cross, eucharist therapy bless god helping, hope and faith, christian religion concept on sunset background. (Getty Images)
Last year, SIUE sent three “no-contact orders” to conservative student Maggie DeJong that prevented her from having direct or indirect communication with three students who complained about her political views, the report added.
The settlement — won by the conservative Christian legal advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — mandates that three SIUE professors take free speech-related training, and that school officials pay $80,000 to DeJong.
The settlement also reportedly demands that SIUE officials revise their student handbook and policies to “ensure students with varying political, religious and ideological views are welcome in the art therapy program.”
DeJong previously told Fox & Friends First that she had frequently participated in class discussions on “contentious” topics, such as race relations, religion, the Chinese coronavirus, and censorship.
But before finishing up with her three-year graduate program, the conservative student received the no-contact order after her classmates had taken offense to her social media posts regarding abortion and defunding the police.
ADF Senior Counsel Tyson Langhoffer told Fox News that DeJong had offended her classmates when she defended Kyle Rittenhouse and denounced critical race theory, which led to the university prohibiting her from fully participating in class discussions.
The legal group added that the university has asked DeJong’s peers to report her for “harmful rhetoric” and issued the orders without first allowing the conservative student to defend herself.
A SIUE spokesperson directed Fox News to a statement from Chancellor James T. Minor, who insisted that the university is “unequivocally committed to protecting First Amendment rights and does not have policies that restrict free speech nor support censorship.”
“For decades, universities have embraced the challenge of vigorously protecting free speech while at the same time creating a safe learning environment for the expression of diverse views. Protecting these two principles can create tensions,” Minor said.
ADF Legal Counsel Mathew Hoffmann said in a statement on Thursday that “Public universities can’t punish students for expressing their political and religious viewpoints.”
“Maggie, like every other student, is protected under the First Amendment to respectfully share her personal beliefs, and university officials were wrong to issue gag orders and silence her speech,” Hoffmann affirmed.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
Exclusive – Trump Adviser Lynne Patton: He Will Reinstate Title 42 on Day 1 to Fight Child Trafficking in Illegal Immigration
Lynne Patton, a senior adviser to former President Donald Trump, appeared on Breitbart News Saturday, where she discussed Trump’s commitment to combatting child trafficking on the heels of the recent viewing of the blockbuster film Sound of Freedom at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Patton told host Matthew Boyle, Breitbart News’s Washington bureau chief, that Trump intends to reinstate Title 42 on day one, with the aim of combatting child trafficking if he returns to the Oval Office. The Biden administration allowed the program to expire in May.
“On day one when Trump gets back in office in 2024, he has pledged to reinstate title 42, which will immediately and safely return children, migrant children, unaccompanied minors, back to their own families in their own countries where they belong,” Patton pledged. “Right now, a lot of your listeners might not know, but Biden – obviously everybody knows he undid Title 42 – but what that does, is it also, it forces migrant children to be released into the interior of the United States, where they are at the mercy of these predators, and so it’s extremely dangerous. It wasn’t just kind of to prevent people from having COVID into this country, it was basically, you know, to prevent unaccompanied miners, all these types of unsafe conditions from transpiring, and the fact that this current administration let that expire is inexplicable.”
LISTEN:
She emphasized earlier in the interview that Trump was fighting to combat human trafficking in the White House during his first term.
“Here’s the crazy thing in the middle of – this was before the Mueller report was even released, right, and everybody was thinking this was going to be the hammer that basically tied Trump to collusion with Russia and all this stuff – and even in the midst of all that, President Trump was focused on saving children,” Patton said. “And I want to say that even in the midst of all these continued false indictments this week, and last week, he’s still focused on saving children.”
She noted that Tim Ballard, who is the former Department of Homeland Security special agent portrayed by John Caviezel in Sound of Freedom, met with the 45th president at the White House and became part of his administration.
RELATED: Former President Donald Trump and Sound of Freedom Star Jim Caviezel Greet Attendees
David Ng / Breitbart News“He had Tim Ballard at the White House long before most people even knew who he was,” Patton said. “But he was, obviously, Ballard was a former special agent with Homeland Security and founder of Operation Underground Railroad at the time, which rescues and rehabilitates victims of human trafficking, and at the President’s invitation, he came to the White House, talked about these stories, and that obviously human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world. Over 50 million victims are in human… or sex slavery globally today, which in the movie, if you watch it, they say that more humans are trapped in slavery today than at any other time in history, including when slavery was legal. So that’s just mind-blowing.”
RELATED: Exclusive — Sound of Freedom’s Tim Ballard: Thousands of Children “Disappearing” into USA
Jack Knudsen / Breitbart News“Ballard told Trump a story about how, you know, you can sell a bag of cocaine once, but you can sell, unfortunately, a ten-year-old child for at least five to ten times a day for ten years straight, and it’s heartbreaking, and I think that really struck a chord with Trump. And you know, that very day, he ended up appointing Ballard to his White House advisory council to end human trafficking and this was back in, you know, 2017.”
Trump signed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2018, which shut down the website Backpage “which was obviously one of the biggest sort of underground websites for sex trafficking,” as Patton noted,
She added, “I think Trump indicted seven people who were responsible for operating and running and pimping men and women out on that page.”
“So it’s amazing how far we’ve come today, where Joe Biden is arguably and his immigration reckless immigration policies are arguably turning the southern border into the largest human trafficking crisis in the world,” she said. “We’ve done a complete 180, Matt, since Trump’s last office in this area and Tim Ballard is the first to point it out.”
RELATED: President Trump Greeted with Applause Ahead of Sound of Freedom Special Screening
David Ng / Breitbart NewsBreitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
No comments:
Post a Comment